The Bloomberg Consumer Comfort Index rose to minus 35.9 in the period ended Feb. 10 from minus 36.3 in the prior week. But notice that the recession of the early 1990s saw a dip below -20 but quickly rebounded. We are seeing no such rebound from below -20 in this recession (although the NBER claims that it ended in June 2009). I am not so confident given the tenacity of negative consumer confidence. Over the past three months, we have seen some commodity prices skyrocket. First, lumber has soared 23.77%. Second, gasoline has soared 15.91%. While gold and silver are...

Honolulu (HawaiiNewsNow) - Accorrding to the 2012 Point-in-Time Count, there are nearly 6,300 homeless across the state. A proposed house bill would establish a program that helps those not from Hawaii return to their home state and reconnect with their family. State Representative Rida Cabanilla is proposing House Bill 533, which establishes the 'Return-to-Home' program and is seeking $100,000 in appropriations to fund the endeavor. "It's (the program) only for select individuals that can really benefit from the program, meaning they have support services, they want to go home, but they can't go home," Cabanilla said. "That sort of stuff."...

Sorry Mr. President, Manufacturing Will Not Save Us Richard Florida Feburary 13, 2013 In last night's State of the Union address, President Obama said: "Our first priority is making America a magnet for new jobs and manufacturing." He added: After shedding jobs for more than 10 years, our manufacturers have added about 500,000 jobs over the past three. Caterpillar is bringing jobs back from Japan. Ford is bringing jobs back from Mexico. After locating plants in other countries like China, Intel is opening its most advanced plant right here at home. And this year, Apple will start making Macs in...

If you missed President Obama’s State of the Union address last night, you didn’t miss much – especially if you watched any of his past four State of the Union addresses. We heard the same recycled rhetoric, and we heard his Orwellian declaration that the cornucopia of new federal programs he proposed, as well as his intention to eradicate world poverty, wouldn’t “increase our deficit by a single dime.” Of course, he glossed over the inconvenient facts. He boasted about job creation, but didn’t mention that real unemployment is higher today than when he took office. He touted all...

Art Cashin: A Dormant US Inflation Indicator Just Spiked, And It's Got Me Thinking Of Weimar And Zimbabwe Sam RoFebruary 13, 2013, 3:58 AM Veteran trader Art Cashin has been more concerned about the threat of inflation in the U.S. than most. In a recent interview with Eric King of King World News, he notes that the once dormant threat of inflation could be waking up. From King World News: ...That having been said, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis puts out what is called the ‘Monetary Stock.’ It is the ‘raw material’ of the money supply, and it...

If the banking industry had a “biggest losers” award, Bank of America Corp. (B of A) would win – and that’s not a good thing. B of A comes by its image problem honestly, and this may be the only way that “honesty” and “Bank of America” can be paired in a sentence without prompting laughter from bystanders. The company’s sins have been widely reported. B of A essentially crafts laws, much to the chagrin of its customers and taxpayers in general, that are protected in court by well-funded trial lawyers and enforced by the politicians they help keep in...

The Real State Of The Union Is Bleak James Kunstler, Kunstler.comFebruary 12, 2013, 8:56 AMThe fog of chatter about Federal Reserve money-printing shenanigans, currency wars, fiscal intransigence, exchange rates, and alphabetized rescue operations conceals the central reality of the historical moment: that all industrial economies now face epic contraction, even rip-roaring China in its absurd and spectacular bid to become the latest drive-in utopia. The so-called advanced nations of the world are all sliding toward something less than they wish to be, and the so-called developing nations will backslide further into poverty and anarchy where development will never happen. The...

A new study finds that 48% of recent college graduates are now in jobs that do not require a bachelor’s degree, and 37% hold jobs that require just a high school diploma. The study, titled “Why Are Recent College Graduates Underemployed? University Enrollments and Labor Market Realities," was conducted by the Center for College Affordability and Productivity using employment data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. "Student-loan programs and federal assistance programs are based on some sort of implicit assumption that we're training people for the jobs of the future," says Richar Vedder, director of the center and a...

We progress, marching forward leaving behind us a trail of yesterdays, filled with events large and small, assembling memories, but some of the more momentous occurrences rise to a superior level which we include in our collective “history.” In that wake of our advance some of those momentous waves swell further, rising to become events that only hindsight can identify as pivotal moments in that shared recollection. UTOPIA Such hindsight is not always 20/20. We may be aware of the events as they unfold, but their significance and impact on our march forward is not always self evident and years...

A tradition after each national election, presidential or midterm, is for the pundit class to pontificate on whether and how the results point to a realignment. This exercise dates back at least to the publication of The Emerging Republican Majority by Kevin Phillips in 1969, and it continues to this day. Now, of course, the hot topic is the so-called emerging Democratic majority, dominated by young people, nonwhites, and upscale social liberals. Pundits across the political spectrum are offering free advice to the Republican party on how to change its ways lest it face extinction at the hands of this...

Reuters has an interesting piece on President Obama’s second term economic plans to be announced at The State of the Union address. “Obama previewed his economic growth plan in a speech to House of Representatives Democrats this week, telling them he would stress the importance of education, development of clean energy, and infrastructure. There were no details on the new initiatives for infrastructure, manufacturing, clean energy and education, elements first reported by the New York Times.” Isn’t this the same plan from his first term? Clean energy was a costly bust, and he still wants to have government control education...

John Williams: How To Survive the Illusion Of Economic Recovery Economics / Great Depression IIFebruary 09, 2013 - 01:40 PM GMT By: The Gold ReportJohn Williams There is no economic recovery, and there are no signs that a recovery is coming, says Shadowstats.com author John Williams. In this Gold Report interview, he blames mal-adjusted inflation statistics for creating an alternate reality that overestimates economic activity in a way that is unsustainable. Williams warns that eventually the painful truth will be so difficult that even government manipulation won't be able to deny it and that is when hyperinflation will take its...

<p>The Fed Is Beginning To Remove The Punchbowl… Are You Ready For What’s Coming?</p>
<p>Consider its recent FOMC minutes released on January 3 2013.</p>
<p>With regard to the possible costs and risks of purchases, a number of participants expressed the concern that additional purchases could complicate the Committee’s efforts to eventually withdraw monetary policy accommodation, for example, by potentially causing inflation expectations to rise or by impairing the future implementation of monetary policy.</p>

BlackRock: It's Way Too Early To Worry About Inflation Sam RoFebruary 10, 2013, 8:20 AMThere's no shortage of people who are freaking out about inflation, thanks to the Fed's ultra-easy monetary policy. However, convincing evidence of inflation has yet to appear in the economic data. Russ Koesterich, Chief Investment Strategist at BlackRock, has a new post on the iShares blog titled When to Worry About Inflation. He says concerns of inflation are premature for at least two reasons (verbatim): 1.There is no wage inflation. Overall wage growth in the United States remains sluggish. The reason: The labor market is healing...

The winter sunlight barely touches the depths of the abandoned store, where wires dangle from the ceiling, wood shavings scatter the floor, a King Lear shelf marker lies on the stairs, and a Led Zeppelin poster hangs spurned in a rack. The standalone building in Danbury, Connecticut, still bears the name of the Borders book chain that collapsed in 2011, and strewn on its cash register are fire-sale price lists for its fixtures and fittings. But nobody wanted them either. Instead its 8ft book cases stand bare and upright in the gloom, like the ruins of a bygone age. In...

Global demographics, not domestic policy, will control who comes and who goes. In Washington, politicians are trying to reform America's immigration system, again. Both President Obama and Republican Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) are proposing "paths to citizenship" for an estimated 11 million illegal immigrants. Other proposals abound, including finishing the border fence, creating a better E-Verify system for employers and passing the last Congress' Dream Act. All of these ideas, however, fundamentally misunderstand immigration in America: Future immigration is probably going to be governed not by U.S. domestic policy choices but by global demographics.... --snip-- ...that Puerto Rico's fertility rate...

"Already some in Congress are trying to undo these automatic spending cuts. My message to them is simple: No," Mr. Obama said from the White House briefing room Monday evening. "I will veto any effort to get rid of those automatic spending cuts to domestic and defense spending." November 21, 2011

After the now several week old exploding battery fiasco, Boeing is nowhere closer to resolving the recurring problem for its appropriately renamed Nightmareliner. But the worst for the company may be yet ahead: as the following chart from Stone McCarthy shows, January new aircraft orders collapsed from 183 in December to a meaningless 2 in January: a seasonally strong month, with some 150 orders a year ago, and more weakness to come as Boeing just warned its first Norwegian delivery due in April may be delayed. But while it was expected that the company's quality control failure would eventually catch...

In February, 2009, I wrote for the Wall Street Journal an article entitled Reaganomics versus Obamanomics. The article explained that the emerging Obamanomics was pursuing exactly the opposite of every policy of the enormously successful Reaganomics, and predicted that it would produce exactly the opposite results. Well, the results are in, and under President Obama the American people have now suffered the worst 5 years since the Great Depression, as first explained by Steve McCann of the American Thinker on January 25. McCann writes, “From 2009 through 2012, the Obama cabal, and their allegiance to statist policies, has been in...

The drag to Gross Domestic Product caused by cuts in defense spending in the fourth quarter of 2012 could be just the beginning of a long, painful process, according to economic experts. GDP fell by 0.1 percent in the fourth quarter, the first such negative growth since 2009 and an economic wet blanket after a 3.1 percent increase in the previous quarter. A 22 percent drop in government defense spending was blamed for much of the decline. The fourth-quarter drop came as those in the Pentagon waited to see if Congress would reach a deal to avoid sequestration by the...

DAVID WOO: The 'Moment Of Truth' For The US Economy Is Approaching In Just The Next Few Weeks Joe WeisenthalFebruary 7, 2013, 12:05 PM Yesterday at Bloomberg we got the chance to meet David Woo, BofA/ML's brilliant strategist for Global FX and rates. The focus of our segment was on the Japanese yen, but off camera Woo had some interesting thoughts on the US economic situation, and why we're about to approach what he calls a 'moment of truth.' He noted to us that there's been a growing divergence between the S&P 500 and consumer sentiment, and that it may...

A comprehensive new Harvard University report on Americans under 30, the so-called Millennials, shows that the economy is having a crushing impact, with just 62 percent working, and of those, half are toiling at part-time jobs. The report, released by Harvard's Institute of Politics, paints a depressing economic portrait of young Americans, many of whom are stuck with huge college tuition bills and little chance of finding a high-paying job. But over half, or 59 percent of those aged 18-29, have gone to college and The report reveals that time in college is a better sign of social status than...

Gov. Mark Dayton says in his State of the State speech that past state income tax cuts are partly to blame for chronic budget problems in Minnesota and that political leaders cannot afford to keep delaying difficult tax and spending decisions. Dayton is delivering the annual speech Wednesday night in the state House chamber. He says in advance excerpts provided by his office that income tax cuts in the late '90s were followed by a decade where Minnesota's economy fared worse than the nation as a whole and most other states. The speech is largely a pitch for Dayton's proposal...

An old friend Bloom Energy is making news, and not in a good way. The San Jose Mercury News reported today that Bloom Energy, a political heavyweight, paid workers brought in from Mexico in pesos: "Authorities said Bloom Energy paid the Mexican workers in pesos by wiring funds back to bank accounts in Chihuahua. Bloom also paid for the men to stay in a Sunnyvale motel and provided each with a meal stipend of $50 a day." If true, that's stunning for a company with a board of directors that includes former Secretary of State Colin Powell and Silicon Valley...

Layoffs have touched nearly every American household in some fashion over the last few years, according to new survey data to be released Thursday by the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University. While about 8 percent of Americans are unemployed, nearly a quarter of Americans say they were laid off at some point during the recession or afterward, according to the survey. More broadly, nearly eight in 10 say they know someone in their circle of family and friends who has lost a job. “This to me is why the recession was so all-consuming and is...

Yes, the Dow and S&P500 hit new highs. But the rally’s hiding huge risks: “GDP turns negative as U.S. economic recovery stalls,” screams one headline. Another hears a “Ticking Time Bomb.” World’s central bankers at Davos warn cheap money’s blowing a new asset bubble. Dr. Doom, Marc Faber, “loves the high odds of a ‘big-time’ market crash.” Another, Nouriel Roubini, says “prepare for a perfect storm,” while Bond King Bill Gross sees a “credit supernova” dead ahead. Rally? Bubble? Crash? Global? Is the economy “peaking?” Are we on a long, slow-growth downhill slide to a 1% GDP? Is our banking...

The Japanese have said “Enough.” After a generation of stagnation, they’ve chosen an all-of-the-above policy to boost economic growth. The nation’s new prime minister, Shinzo Abe, is promising a “three arrows” strategy: bold monetary easing, increased public-works spending, and structural changes, such as regulatory reform. He’s throwing the ramen against the shoji and hoping something will stick. Some of those ideas are good ones, some probably aren’t. But it’s clear that Tokyo’s priority is growth, growth, growth. Time to get Nippon moving again. Nations probably never choose decline, at least not consciously. More likely they become victims of a creeping...

SHARONVILLE, OH (FOX19) - Employees at Target World in Sharonville say guns sales have been like nothing they've ever seen before. "You can't take away people's rights without people fighting back," says David Drury, a Target World employee. The increase in sales started just after the Newtown, Connecticut school shootings. "The boom has been pretty incredible. People are wanting to protect their rights while they have them and people are scared. They don't want their rights to be eroded," said Drury. Because of that, even on the night of the Super Bowl, and even at kickoff time, Target World was...

They say that time is money. What they don’t say is that money may be running out of time. There may be a natural evolution to our fractionally reserved credit system that characterizes modern global finance. Much like the universe, which began with a big bang nearly 14 billion years ago, but is expanding so rapidly that scientists predict it will all end in a “big freeze” trillions of years from now, our current monetary system seems to require perpetual expansion to maintain its existence. And too, the advancing entropy in the physical universe may in fact portend a similar...

Nearly Half Of American Families Live On The Edge Of Financial Ruin Mandi WoodruffFebruary 4, 2013, 1:19 PM In the past few years, Americans have learned a thing or two about how quickly disaster can strike. And with each Hurricane Sandy, housing crisis, and stock market crash that rocks our world, we're faced with the realization that many of us simply aren't prepared for the worst. A sobering new report by the Corporation for Enterprise Development shows nearly half of U.S. households (132.1 million people) don't have enough savings to weather emergencies, or finance long-term needs like college tuition, health...

Now that the federal government is playing an ever larger role in the economy, a look at Washington's track record seems to be long overdue. The recent release of the Federal Reserve Board's transcripts of its deliberations back in 2007 shows that their economic prophecies were way off. How much faith should we put in their prophecies today — or the policies based on those prophecies? Even after the housing market began its collapse in 2006, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said in 2007, "The impact on the broader economy and financial markets of the problems in the subprime market...

THIRTY YEARS AGO Margaret Thatcher turned Britain into the world’s leading centre of “thinking the unthinkable”. Today that distinction has passed to Sweden. The streets of Stockholm are awash with the blood of sacred cows. The think-tanks are brimful of new ideas. The erstwhile champion of the “third way” is now pursuing a far more interesting brand of politics. Sweden has reduced public spending as a proportion of GDP from 67% in 1993 to 49% today. It could soon have a smaller state than Britain. It has also cut the top marginal tax rate by 27 percentage points since 1983,...

Getting our heads around apparent irrational exuberance on Wall Street... On Friday, February 1, the market rally continued as the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 14,010. Many investors rejoiced, and conservatives wondered if they were living on the same planet as the investment community. Unemployment is, after all, still at a publicly-declared 8%, a number that can only be reached if you stop counting a jobless person if his unemployment checks have run out, and if you consider an unemployed lawyer, accountant, salesman or buyer as “employed” if he bags groceries or delivers newspapers. The real number can be...

White House Council of Economic Adviser Chair Alan Krueger has begun his monthly statements on the nation’s employment situation with nearly the exact same sentences almost every month since November 2011, just after he was installed as one of Obama’s most senior economic advisers. With the exception of some variation in the May 2012 statement, Krueger has mailed it in every month, not bothering to change a thing in the opening lines of his commentary on the statistic that is perhaps more important to Americans. Krueger’s statements are released by the White House the morning the latest employment numbers become...

JEFF SAUT: The Stock Market Will Probably Tank After Obama's State Of The Union Joe WeisenthalJanuary 4, 2013 Raymond James strategist Jeff Saut offers his take on where the market is headed next. Today is session 23 in the typical 17- to 25-session duration of a "buying stampede." Such skeins only have one- to three-session pauses or pullbacks before they exhaust themselves on the upside. While a few have lasted for 25 - 30 sessions, it is very rare to have one last for more than 30 sessions. That said, this one feels like it will extend towards the State...

Every year, employment drops by almost 3 million during January. While the drop was worse than 2012, it is on par with the drops in 2010 and 2011. Of course, the Census Bureau whips out the old X-12 ARIMA smoothing models (maybe even the new and improved X-13!) and produces this much more palatable chart. Phew! That is much better for the media (and economy cheerleaders like Mark Zandi) to tout. Thanks to the ARIMA smoothing model, employment INCREASED by +157.000! As my students know, I like the raw, unsmoothed numbers. All the smoothed numbers tell you is … over...

When it comes to reversing the economy’s fourth-quarter growth decline, shale gas is the answer, says Wilbur Ross, chief of private equity firm WL Ross. “The best way to overcome the negative gross domestic product figures that were just released would be to encourage the exploitation of shale gas both for domestic and for international purposes,” he tells Fox Business Network. The clean energy concerns that have stifled permit issuance for shale gas extraction can easily be solved, Ross notes. “The greenies worry that shale gas would drive the price of electricity down and make sun power and wind power...

An Applebee's diner refused to leave a tip for religious reasons. The waitress who exposed it wonders if Jesus will pay her bills. I was a waitress at Applebee's restaurant in Saint Louis. I was fired Wednesday for posting a picture on Reddit.com of a note a customer left on a bill. I posted it on the web as a light-hearted joke. This didn't even happen at my table. The note was left for another server, who allowed me to take a picture of it at the end of the night. Someone had scribbled on the receipt, "I give God...

WASHINGTON — A bipartisan Senate plan to dramatically expand a visa program for highly skilled foreign workers resembles a proposal unveiled by Microsoft last fall, but well exceeds the company’s own goals. Led by Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, five Republicans and five Democrats rolled out the Immigration Innovation Act on Tuesday to lift the annual quota of H-1B visas for those workers from 65,000 to 115,000. That new cap would grow each year if demand outstrips supply, potentially up to 300,000 visas annually.

Following the governmemt's Employment Situation Summary yesterday, two words were noticeably absent at the Associated Press (here, here, and here), Bloomberg, Reuters, CNBC, and the New York Times: "seasonally adjusted."

-Snip- And while successful retailers in 2012 may add stores this year, those that have performed very poorly may have to cut locations during 2013 to improve margins or reverse losses. For many retailers, the sales situation is so bad that it is not a question of whether they will cut stores, but when and how many. -Snip-

President Obama blamed the recent contraction of the U.S. economy on “bad decisions in Washington” in his weekly address. The national economy shrank by 0.1 percent in the fourth quarter of 2012, according to figures released this week by the Commerce Department. The contraction was an unexpected reversal of months of modest economic growth since the end of the recession in mid-2009. Obama said in his address that the dip was the fault of “bad decisions” being made in Washington. “We began this year with economists and business leaders saying that we are poised to grow in 2013,” he said....

... Obama says 2013 can be a year of solid economic growth, but only if Washington gets out of the way. In his weekly radio and Internet address, Obama says there are signs of progress in real estate, manufacturing and job-creation. But other signs are worrying. Unemployment ticked up from 7.8 percent in December to 7.9 percent in January. And the Commerce Department says the economy shrank at an annual rate of 0.1 percent in the final months of 2012. Obama says the U.S. must lower health care costs and close tax loopholes for corporations and the wealthy.

According To ECRI's Lakshman Achuthan, We Are 8 Months Into A Recession Doug Short, Advisor PerspectivesFebruary 1, 2013, 6:33 PM The Weekly Leading Index (WLI) of the Economic Cycle Research Institute (ECRI) slipped in the latest public data. It is now at 129.7 versus the previous week's upwardly revised 130.7 (previously 130.6). See the WLI chart in the Appendix below. However, the WLI annualized growth indicator (WLIg) rose, now at 8.3, up from last week's 7.2. WLIg has been in expansion territory since August 10th of last year, and it is at its highest level since May of 2010. ECRI...

In the brave new world of Barack Obama, the media breathlessly report all of the economic data with a positive spin. On Friday, as the unemployment rate increased for the second straight month, the liberal media was telling us this was good news. Is a higher unemployment rate of 7.9 percent really good news? According to the Associated Press, it was an “upbeat” report. Yet, this unemployment figure is high by historical standards and is higher than the rate at the start of the Obama administration.

Huge Credit Suisse Report Declares: THE GOLD ERA IS COMING TO AN END Joe WeisenthalFebruary 1, 2013, 10:44 AM The anti-gold bandwagon is getting more and more crowded. Analysts Tom Kendall and Ric Deverell of Credit Suisse is out with a bombshell report this morning titled: Gold: The Beginning Of The End Of An Era. The article argues that the 2011 peak of $1921 was the top, and that now the run of the cult metal is coming to an end. The argument essentially boils down to two arguments, which are related. The first is that we're seeing rate normalization....

During a previous life, I was interviewing some soon to be college graduates for a possible position as an Assistant Manager Trainee in one of the 1200 F.W. Woolworth Stores around the fruited plains. Someone at the local University's placement office must have instructed those poor skulls full of mush on the finer points on negotiating a salary, (I just stopped laughing at those dumb kids about a week ago.) Each and every one of the kids asked at the end of the interview about salary, and each used the same wording to tell me that they felt that their...

In a final regulation issued Wednesday, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) assumed that under Obamacare the cheapest health insurance plan available in 2016 for a family will cost $20,000 for the year. Under Obamacare, Americans will be required to buy health insurance or pay a penalty to the IRS. The IRS's assumption that the cheapest plan for a family will cost $20,000 per year is found in examples the IRS gives to help people understand how to calculate the penalty they will need to pay the government if they do not buy a mandated health plan.

The number of Americans not in the labor force grew by 169,000 in January, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ latest jobs report. BLS labels people who are unemployed and no longer looking for work as “not in the labor force,” including people who have retired on schedule, taken early retirement, or simply given up looking for work. There were 89 million of them last month.

IT'S SHOWTIME: Markets Rallying On Gigantic Day For The Global Economy Joe WeisenthalFebuary 1, 2013, 3:03 AM Let's do this folks. US futures are rallying on what will be a huge day for the economy. European markets have opened higher, with the exception of Spain, which is getting slammed. We've got several big European PMIs coming up over the next hour or so. Then the focus will shift to the US where we've got US manufacturing data, US car sales data, and of course the monthly jobs report. While you were sleeping, China and Japan both rallied, with the latter...